Or maybe, just maybe it's because the UK is such a damn little fertile isle for the development of music,
as evidenced by their decades-long hold on various levels of American listeners. Right now, for instance,
the Union Jack is doing little business on the Billboard charts, but is being fetishized below the radar
for evolution-tree offshoots like the garage scene and mashups. Have you heard of this guy called The
Streets?

A great deal of this Transatlantic love seems to be a result of British talent for making stylistic
casserole, taking a pink eraser to the lines between genres. Which is where The Bees come in, a
hard-to-categorize group that shares much of their aesthetic with Astralwerks mates The Beta Band and
Simian. Ostensibly a rock band in its foundations, The Bees (known in the U.S. as A Band of Bees,
due to some hott legal action) stirs in elements from a wide variety of sources, including tropicalia,
dance music, and 70s soundtrack soul.

It's all summed up nicely by the cover at the chewy nougat center of Sunshine Hit Me, a conservative
runthrough of Os Mutantes' "A Minha Menina". Like those frenzied Brazilians, The Bees excel at
wadding up disparate elements into a vaguely psychedelic sound containing a believable tropical flair--
despite hailing from the Isle of Wight, which grainy festival footage suggests is hardly Rio. Bear
witness, for example, to "No Trophy", a reggae that somehow circumvents Official
Pitchfork Policy of loathing that entire genre.

It's the fine opener "Punchbag" that steals the show here, however, growing from a music box Rhodes figure
into a piece of dreamy microhouse that utilizes a near-glitch bassline and glass-bottle percussion that
could've been lifted from a Prefuse 73 track. Similar elements frolic through "Angry Man", though this
time with vocals that more clearly recall Curtis Mayfield than Wayne Coyne, and rich organ adding polyester
strut.

As the disc plays on, though, the tempo drops, and with it the score. The second half of the disc
misguidedly trades in the eccentricities of the above tracks for piano-focused atmospherics and analog
chillouts, reducing the affair to competent and inoffensive (if not terribly interesting) backdrops like
those of Zero 7. Whereas the Side A instrumental "Sunshine" nicely breaks the getting-tired Moon Safari
mold with moments of loose jazz-rock jamming, the backloaded quartet of downtempo numbers that ends the
album does so on a breezily hookless note.

Sunshine Hit Me does, however, remain an above-average production of reasonable merit, further proof
that Astralwerks seems to have cornered the market on decent, but not quite excellent rock/electronic hybrid
bands with potential. To wit, The Bees show signs of having creative reserves deep enough to power a
long career; whether that career will be in pushing boundaries of genre collision or scoring commercials
for text messaging remains to be seen. Still, their debut album has a handful of singles suitable for
airplay in that Clear Channel-free wonderland of Engerland, singles good enough to quicken the breath of
those of us whose toes curl at the site of a "UK import" sticker.